Hailing from the historic city of Kanazawa, the producer behind Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and Perfume’s catchy, fresh electro-pop grew up taking after his father’s love of machines and started down the path of composing entirely original songs by grade school. At times gorgeous and at times chaotic, I delved into the real intentions of this unrivaled prince showing his dazzlingly extraordinary music to the world.
From the crack in the door, the figure of a blond-haired man can be seen stretched across a line of chairs. On his brow rests a white fever-reducing sheet. His handsome face is pallid like an LED lightbulb. I think: “Wow, looks painful.”
The stress of working on his new album, routine end-of-the-year fatigue and a cold have all caught up to him, I’ve gathered. Can he even make it to the stage for the COUNTDOWN JAPAN performance at Makuhari Messe coming up right before his eyes? He wouldn’t go straight through to the hospital like this… Would he?
It would’ve been only natural to expect that this sudden attack of fever had knocked him out for good. And yet, thirty minutes before he’s scheduled to go on stage, the musician abruptly sits up, straightens his back and opens the door. The smile that crosses his face when he sees my surprise is almost too radiant, making him look like the prince of some faraway land. He’s fully charged and ready to go. Part of me wants to check for a plug in his back.
Bathed in the intense spotlights, right hand raised high in the air as he mixes the music using digital tools, he’s greeted by the voices of male fans screaming, “Yasutaka!” This blond man is Nakata Yasutaka (35). He’s best known for being the music producer behind the works of artists like Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and Perfume, but today, he appears as a member of CAPSULE, his own unit.
With a snap of his magic fingers, he’s made sold-out audiences dance in ecstasy with their lightsticks waving high over their heads, brought huge success to Perfume as an electro idol group, and turned Kyary into an iconic singer representing both Japanese kawaii and her generation as a whole. The freshness of his digital sensibilities and their near-future imagery have Yasutaka’s music now in high demand for movies and dramas. “As a producer, he’s flawless,” says Suzuki Ryoma, the head of Warner Music Japan sublabel unBORDE. “He understands when to time a release, how many songs to include and how the market will respond to it, and he studies the entertainment industry in its entirety to know what this generation wants.” On top of that, he consistently ranks in among the top five most popular domestic DJs with his regular club events.
Abundant talent, looks, success, and those blond locks. Combine all that, and he’d have to be a prince. Yet at a club event on Halloween, seeing Yasutaka from the side in a cloak like a sci-fi movie mastermind, he looked like a commanding officer burning with ambition. In my recollections of the night, he felt too distant to even approach, like there was a barrier between us.
This multifaceted image is no different from his music. CAPSULE’s new album would be a shock to those who only knew songs by Kyary. From the machine gun precision of the rhythm and sound to its 2001: A Space Odyssey-like atmosphere, it paints a picture and tells a story of unknown universes and lifeforms. It’s dance music, yet it leaves the listener with the lingering traces of an epic science fiction movie. Given his notorious reluctance to discuss his personal matters, Yasutaka is vividly associated with his cyber-inspired goggles in the minds of many, and his real self is nothing short of an enigma. Is Yasutaka a handsome prince enjoying the pleasures of his own ability, or a steely commander who’s sealed his heart inside one of his synthesizers?
In 1980, YMO’s “Rydeen” became a full-blown social phenomenon and the streets overflowed with their techno-pop stylings. That same year, Yasutaka was born in Kanazawa as the eldest son of an independent business owner father and housewife mother.
His father collected film soundtracks and was a music lover, even going to see Little Buddha after he heard Sakamoto Ryuichi had composed the score. He was also deeply interested in the new age music of that time, and Yasutaka distinctly recalls finding the Kintaro his father listened to at full volume in his room to be “incredibly grating.”
In addition to music, his father also had a strong interest in hardware like video cameras and computers. He bought multiple speaker models and would rewire them to his liking with a few of his own hacks. Yasutaka, who used the excess speakers for his own purposes, says of their relationship, “I don’t know about my musical DNA, but my love of gadgets definitely comes from my dad.”
There was a piano in their house, and Yasutaka and his elder sister attended piano lessons near their elementary school. While he enjoyed the piano, he detested the practice lessons intended for beginner pianists and their near-athletic pressure to compete for the best time and skill under the same conditions. He also hated to play in front of others, but he found the tuxedo and bow tie he was made to wear to his piano recitals all the more unbearable. Even at his school, he developed the reputation of “talented pianist Nakata-kun” and often found himself running from offers to accompany the choir or conduct musical performances. He was in the perfect position to bask in the attention of girls in the arts.
Yasutaka, who had begun to disregard his etudes and instead play the piano as he pleased, started composing songs by as early as fifth grade. “The first songs I made were much more modern music than what I do now,” he tells me. “I used everything in the house from our kettle to cans of seaweed and struck them to make noise. I went about it practically like a children’s arts and crafts class. To me, music was something free you could make and have fun with however you liked without any restrictions. I had no intention of showing them to others, so there were no choruses, and I never gave them titles.” His childhood home was filled with a boundless supply of screws and lumber, and collecting and combining the sounds each of them made was far more fun than he could ever consider construction to be.
Nonetheless, he was far from a pale-skinned recluse who shut himself indoors. After school, he played soccer in the schoolyard, and on the way home, he’d stop by a small candy store connected to the school where he and his friends would munch on cheap sweets while immersing themselves in Fatal Fury, a popular game at the time. The hours he spent there were like a dream. Whether he was pedaling away on his bike to the faraway arcade or playing with firecrackers at the Shinto shrine, no one ever spoke ill of him. The Kanazawa of that time was still bathed in the last vestiges of the tranquil Showa era, and Yasutaka says it was the perfect time to be a child.
However, even as he lived his playtime to the fullest, ordinary life to Yasutaka was a tedious existence, and he didn’t feel it was where he belonged. “People who think their daily lives are fun aren’t fit to create,” he says bluntly. “Creators are dissatisfied with what’s around them, and that’s what makes them want to create.” Through music, what he loved most of all, he wanted to express a universe far removed from real life. Most techno is the polar opposite of pop or rock which sings about everyday niceties, and ever since elementary school, he’d been making music aligned with that techno spirit.
When he started recording the songs he’d made, he found himself wanting greater knowledge of instruments and began making frequent visits to the dance- and techno-based specialty record store Import Yamachiku (now closed), an unusual attraction for Kanazawa at the time, where he would buy stacks of foreign instrumental albums for the low price of three for 1,000 yen.
“Music wasn’t something I aspired to pursue from the beginning, and no matter what the genre, there were no creators I respected or especially liked. It’s boring to aim for someone else and imitate what they do.” Blowing past his childhood lessons of copying others, by fifth grade, he followed a strict personal creed of playing original compositions only, a remarkable feat by anyone’s standards.